Love & Passion Quote by Marilyn Monroe

"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul"

Marilyn Monroe, Actress

About this Quote

Hollywood’s genius is its ability to price intimacy like a commodity while pretending it’s all romance and magic. Monroe’s line lands because it uses a clean, tabloid-ready contrast: a “thousand dollars” for a kiss, “fifty cents” for your soul. The joke isn’t just that the numbers are lopsided; it’s that the industry assigns real, inflated value to something visible and saleable (a kiss on screen, a photo op, a rumor) and pennies to the invisible cost of being owned by the machine: privacy, agency, sanity, selfhood.

Monroe knew the economics of being looked at. Her image made fortunes, while her personhood was treated as an inconvenience to be managed. The subtext is a warning disguised as a punchline: you can get rich selling the performance of desire, but the system will bargain-hunt when it comes to your interior life. “Soul” here isn’t theology; it’s leverage. It’s the part of you that says no, that sets terms, that doesn’t translate neatly into box-office metrics.

Context sharpens the bite. Monroe was both an architect of her stardom and a casualty of it, navigating studio control, sexist contracts, and a press ecosystem eager to flatten her into a symbol. The quote reads like a sly inversion of the American dream: success isn’t purity rewarded, it’s boundaries eroded. Delivered in Monroe’s voice, it’s not bitter for bitterness’ sake. It’s the kind of clarity you earn when everyone around you insists the smile is the whole story.

Quote Details

Topic	Movie
Source	Verified source: My Story (Marilyn Monroe, 1974)ISBN: 9780812817072 Text match: 95.00% Provider: Cross-Reference Evidence: In Hollywood a girl's virtue is much less important than her hair-do. You're judged by how you look, not by what you are. Hollywood's a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents. (Page 53 (Chapter 10: "I Get Through the Looking Glass")). Best primary-candidate source located is the posthumously published book "My Story" (New York: Stein and Day, 1974), widely cataloged as authored by Marilyn Monroe and noted as ghostwritten by Ben Hecht. The quote appears as part of a longer passage (often truncated online to only the second sentence). I could verify (a) the existence and publication details of the 1974 Stein and Day edition via a library catalog record, and (b) multiple independent attributions that place the quote on page 53 / Chapter 10; however, I did NOT directly view a scan of page 53 from the 1974 first edition in this search session, so the page-level verification is indirect. If you need the earliest first publication earlier than 1974 (e.g., magazine excerpt, serialization, or manuscript circulation), I did not find a verifiable earlier primary publication during this pass; many quote sites cite secondary compilations (e.g., Roger Taylor’s edited collections) that are later than 1974. Other candidates (1) Fifty Cents for Your Soul (Denise Dietz, 2002) compilation95.0% ... Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss , and fifty cents for your soul . " Mari...
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